Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.