“Eudora Welty said something great that I can only paraphrase. It was something like this: You don’t need to have had the specific experience in order to write the book. You don’t have to have worked in a logging camp to write a logging camp novel. But no one has ever written authentically about an emotion that he or she hasn’t felt. Some of us just need to get out there and feel more emotion before we’re able to write novels that are of course fundamentally about human emotion.”

-Michael Cunningham in an interview with the Wall Street Journal