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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Finally! You're here!"Uh....Do I know you?"Well, no....But you're here, all the same...

And as your writing evolves, what you need and get from it evolves.

In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

I dwell in possibility.

Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.

If it's the last thing I do, I will give every ounce of the rest of my life to helping leaders and churches get better.

Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.

I trust I may be enabled in the treatment of patients always to act with a single eye to their good.

It has to be understood that the world doesn't exist with people who are exactly like us.