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.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

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

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.