Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him - and that if he's lucky!

I wish I could go back and re-write my first novel for the first time. Because I really didn't know what I was doing, and although it was published, it is, after all this time, kind of an embarrassment.

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.