Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.