You just can't tell or calibrate motive or intelligence or sense. So I don't read anything unless someone tells me that it's really smart or illuminating. I don't read any reviews anymore and it's been really liberating.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.