“Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are unacceptable.”

“No cheap tricks.”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told.”

“The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel’s world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject.”

“The world doesn't revolve around you, Drew.""Well, my world does.”

“The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.”

“I tell you, the one thing I hate is an absolutist. I hate absolutist ideologies, I hate absolutist aesthetics, I hate absolutist theologies, they’re the burden and bane of this world.”