You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

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

I am interested in silences

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.

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.