I have no place left to live but in my own heart.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

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.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

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