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Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good', to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.

I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.

Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.