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There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

It's kind of part of human nature to want to know the truth or want to be in on the secret. For stories that focus in on that - like whodunits - it's easy to get drawn into.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.