I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.