She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.