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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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