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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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