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.

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

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

People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

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