“I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.”

“When people say that this kind of fantasy fiction is escapist and evading the real world, well I think that’s an evasion. It’s actually trying to confront something that most people would rather not confront.”

“I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.”

“I think most of us would rather have an audience than countless riches. If we wanted to be rich we would be doing something else.”

“Everybody should read fiction… I don’t think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that won’t educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And it’s not just that mechanics and plumbers don’t read literary fiction, it’s that doctors and lawyers don’t read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesn’t trust art.”

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly.There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.”