When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

I don't reread my books.

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

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.