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.

Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.

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. When you're handwriting, you really just have to move on.

The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by a guy who has decided by page 11 that he's fallen in love with a woman, and they're going to murder her husband so they can be together. There's nothing remotely likeable about him, but James M. Cain brings you so far into his head that, at a certain point, you have that uncomfortable but also thrilling sensation of seeing things exactly as he sees it.

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.

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.