You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

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.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

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

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.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.