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Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

A lot of times with novels, you can get a really deep, engaging story, but there's not a lot happening, frankly. Those books tend to be super-literary and dense, and they require a lot of commitment, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want fast-moving action and gore and plot and excitement, you can get shorted on that.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.

I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.