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Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

If you have an anecdote from one source, you file it away. If you hear it again, it may be true. Then the more times you hear it the less likely it is to be true.

Part of my job is to make sense of all that I hear, and to retell it in a forceful way so that the decision-makers at Treasury can hear it. At least that's how I see it.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

My work is literally my voice.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

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 more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

If your voices are not heard, you can be sure that many others will be - in particular those who are paid to present a point of view, and often do it most effectively.