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People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

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

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, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

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.

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

I generally find fiction without some move to the weird, less imaginative, dull, prosaic. Not all of it, of course, but a lot of it. I suppose it's just a question of taste.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.