I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.