Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

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

There's quite a big gap when it comes to that dual identity of mother and child, or even a pregnant woman, or a nursing woman. It kind of begs the question of that very strong Western idea of the individual self.

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