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In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

I must be free... free to do what I like, say what I like, write what I like, within the limits prescribed for me by my own sense of what is seemly and fitting.

I am the freest author in the world.

If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.

You can only be free as an artist if you're free as a person.