Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.