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.

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