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

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

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.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

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.