A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

People are quite frequently eccentric.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'

everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.