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Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.