"Conveying something through fiction, conveying something through a medium that is based on exaggerations of the truth, of even straight-out lies in the hopes of attaining something better, in hopes of glimpsing the future, then you would almost necessarily have to write outside of your own experience."

"If people think that fiction is limited to being able to speak only from your own experiences, that's a very small role for fiction.  You can speak from a writer's point of view or from a reader's point of view, but however you slice it, it's a smaller world if you subscribe to that belief. As a writer, trying to write stories, I can't believe that's true.  I would not be able to get up and work if I believed that was true."

"Every book is in some way about the author even if it's not about the author."