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As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there's nothing wrong with that.

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.

Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story.