I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.