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" If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it. "

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" I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living. "

" To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like. "

" You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go. "

" I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect. "

" What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web. "

" The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition. "

" That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it? "

" To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life. "

" The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory - and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place - the more frightening it is, because I have no plan. "

" Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer. "

" I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations. "

" I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read. "

" I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well. "

" I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer. "

" When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness. "

" I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated. "

" I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago. "

" I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind. "

" I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality. "