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

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 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.

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

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

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