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Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

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.

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.

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 pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

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

There are very few people who are creative and imaginative. Therefore, fiction is difficult for people to embrace.

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.