One of the axioms of writing is that you should write only what you know from experience. Writers extend that to say that you really only know how to write your own sex: men write only male characters well, and women write only female characters well. That’s why, they say, practically all romance novelists are women, because most men don’t know how to write female genres, because men don’t know how women really think or what they really want.

Whether or not I know what women really want, you’ll have to judge that for yourself. Whether I know, really know, how women think… sometimes, I think I do; other times, I clearly don’t. Whether I— not just I, but whether any writer can write what he’s never experienced, he clearly can, if he understands what he’s writing and can imagine it.