I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.

People die when curiosity goes.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.