A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.