For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.