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.

If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

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

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

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 write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.