Quote

You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

When you read something you have written, you have to confront some of the lies you have been telling yourself.

When you sit down to write, you have to be prepared to strip all of those voices away, all of the censors away, and talk about what you think the truth is, which I think is really the task of the writer - to get to the truth.

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

You know that something is really well written when you have to think so little about the words that are coming out of your mouth, and you're able to dwell in your own headspace to get there.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

We who are interested in relative truth have to keep digging for it and not let ourselves be sucked under.