Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.

Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.