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.

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

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.

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.

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.