A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily life.

Sometimes we get so busy with our daily lives we do not take the steps and time necessary to be introspective.

After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

Life is full of change and uncertainty. We know this. We experience it on a daily basis.

I'm not an exhibitionist; I don't have a compulsion to share the ins and outs of my daily life with a public audience.