Another big moment in terms of that feeling was David Petraeus: if the director of the CIA can't get away with having a secret relationship, then what hope do you have? It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

A Thousand Pardons began at the beginning. I wanted it to be one continuous, almost breathless kind of story. In order to do that, it's really hard not to begin at the beginning. There's such a chain of consequence to everything that happens to main characters - it's very hard to break it apart and still be able to hold the plot in your head.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.