The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.