I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a 'rate of production,' for whom it's a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

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

London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.