"Fiction's not a place for hiding.  Your skin is in the game, from the moment you begin."

"Your fingerprints are all over your writing.  You can write about characters and situations and settings that are entirely divorced from your own experience, but you will still write yourself into your fiction.  The author is visible in the essential nature of a novel.  This is something very simple and obvious, but it was difficult for me to accept.  In fiction, you escape only to run into yourself, again and again."