You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

The truth is in the present moment.

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write