I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.