“At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth.”

“The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.
What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.
It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.””

“The more knowledge you have, the more imagination. The more you can imagine, the more you will be capable to explore the universe.”

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

“The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.”

“There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.”

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

“There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.”

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.”