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

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

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.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

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.

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

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.