Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.

Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake; so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.