"Fiction is able to take life and transform it and make it into something else.  By so doing, it allows us to see things about life that we wouldn't have been able to see before."

"Your first commitment [as a writer] has to be the experience of the reader.  Since fiction is something that's created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have.  This may mean that it's enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else.  It depends on what kind of writer you are."

"Good fiction is not trying to imitate life or trying to reproduce what's going on in life.  Life serves as a catalyst, as a provocation that leads to something fictional that's interesting.  It creates a new world that has its own constraints, its own rules, and its own system that can really be intersting in and of itself.  It can also come back and teach us something about life.  There is a constantly circulating movement in the interchange between life and fiction."

"Fiction starts as speculation.  Writers don't go to the obvious speculation."

"One of the reasons a lot of us read fiction—including me—is that we respond to characters in fiction as if we are responding to people.  We can have intense reactions to them.  We can enjoy them as people."

"I think it's probably good to believe whatever will encourage you to write."

"A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you feel like a character is taking over at certain points.  I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things.  You've created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own."

"The thing that you need to never forget is that, when it comes to fiction, everything is made out of words.  What you end up with serves as a catalyst—it's a series of words that interacts with the mind of the reader to create something that feels like a real person to them." (artist)

"The novel about character (in which character is primary) is never going to die.  I still read a lot of books because I'm interested in the characters.  I think everybody does to some degree or another."