I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.