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

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.

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.

It is not so important what deeds we do when times are good, but what good we do in bad times.

It might feel like the end of the world--but it's the beginning of your art.

I have exercise-induced asthma.

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

It looks like a galosh with electronics in it.

Vaccines are not traditionally big money makers. They're given once or a few times in one's life, so they're never going to be blockbusters.

If you must make a noise, make it quietly.

Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.

Questions provide the key to unlocking our unlimited potential.