I am interested in silences

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.