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I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

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.

I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves.

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.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

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.