I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

...if you catalogue grudges, anything looks bad.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.