So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

With a time-based medium like theater or film, you can't have the audience getting restless in their seats. They're stuck there on their bums; you have to pay enormous attention to pace and you can't lose your way.

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

I'm very interested in how idealistic young people can get caught up in all sorts of systems of extreme belief, you know, whether it's cults or whether it's suicide bombers.