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Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet.

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

Like all of my fictions, 'Sinner' is a mirror. Look into it and you will find yourself. What you do with what you see is your choice.

A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.