I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I'm not really a mass market writer.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

I don't inflict horrors on readers.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.