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An obsession is where something will not leave your mind.

The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.

I'm an outsider.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.

I know what it feels like to be an outsider.

I love a kind of shambling outsider protagonist who always feels like they're 'other.'

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

I don't think I'm an outsider at all.

I think there is something a little too self conscious about enjoying being an outsider.