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

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

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

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

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

He traveled in order to come home.

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