Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

To me one of the amazing technologies of writing is the way it can listen in on thoughts. I don't feel that that's natural to other art forms in the same way.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.