Quote

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

All of my books come from pain.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably haven't read them.

I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive. It's horrifying.

Anything that I undergo, I look at as redemptive suffering.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

I identified in a very deep way with the individuals I was writing about because the theme that runs through this story is of extraordinary hardship and the will to overcome it.