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Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.

A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it's reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.