People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.

Never tickle a sleeping dragon.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

I haven't spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy.

It's that anonymous person who meanders through the streets and feels what's happening there, feels the pulse of the people, who's able to create.

I like Jesus, I mean, I think he was a good guy.

I was going to get my teeth whitened, but I said, "I'll just get a tan instead."

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.

Silently, like thoughts that come and go, the snowflakes fall, each one a gem.