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One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.

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.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

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.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.