To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.
Ninety percent of the time, I'm wearing imaginary people's clothing. I don't feel a huge pressure to go out and, like, hit the town, hit the boutiques.
You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.
Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.
I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.
Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.
Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people.
As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, 'People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange'
