William Trevor

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

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.

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