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In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.

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

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.

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

Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.