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

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

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

He traveled in order to come home..

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

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

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..

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..

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 societ….

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows hims….

As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of ….

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….

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 fa….

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

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