The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.