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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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