“Fiction tells you, by the making up of truth, what really is true. That’s all fiction writers can do.”

“Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice.”

“My father had osteomyelitis—his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder. . . . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all . . . ”

“Moments of crisis [in my writing] were to become a way of exploring and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience . . . ”

“There's the shattering randomness of [the Kennedy assassination]: the missing motive, the violence that people seem to watch simultaneously from a disinterested distance.”

As his biographer writes, Félix Nadar’s autograph books provide an astonishing record of the rich cultural life of Paris during the Second Empire.