The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

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

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

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