Hay Festival Segovia: Nicole Krauss: 'Writing a novel is like building a house' And, after the first germs of an idea have come to her, how does she then begin to develop them? "The way I start," she explains, "is to build one of the rooms, as if building on a strange, distinctive image that I can't stop thinking about: maybe a doorknob. Then, I have to build a door... For Krauss, it is the freedom of writing that is so intoxicating: "Every time I sit down to write," she says, "I can become anyone." It is not at all, then, about "her." "Writing for me is not a form of self-expression," she says. To write, and to read, is to expand yourself - it is to multiply your lives. Every time I have to start to become another character, I have a chance to escape this one life I've been given. It's too short. It's not enough! The combination of the room's length, a fractious microphone and one of Krauss's fans excitedly rustling a plastic bag next to me sadly renders Krauss's answer to the question "Why did you become a writer?" entirely inaudible. What comes over loud and clear, however, immediately afterwards, are her thoughts on the purpose of writing. "When I sit down to write a novel," she says, "I don't have a goal. I'm trying to make sense of a whole lot of things that don't make sense. I have a succession of ideas and images that haunt me, and I'm trying to see how they relate to each other. In one of the bolder - and perhaps stranger - questions from the floor, a member of the audience asks her why she publishes her books as opposed to just writing them for herself. "Because I need to eat!" would not have been an unreasonable response - but Krauss instead pauses to reflect for a second. Then, she replies with a truth that feels as eternal as it is seldom expressed. "I've always, all my life, found it very difficult to make intense contact with other people," she explains. At the end of your life, I don't think anything will matter more than the contact you made with other people - how much you influenced them, and how much they influenced you. For Krauss, then, her novels are the ultimate way of reaching out to people, establishing a connection with them. And yet, from her perspective, there is an inevitable downside. "The irony of being a writer," she concludes, "is that you're never there to see it. You have to have faith that that conversation between writer and reader exists. Read more reports from Segovia at www.telegraph.co.uk/hayfestival.com Visit the Hay Festival's website for more information