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'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

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

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.