There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

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

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

He traveled in order to come home.

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

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.

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