I feel very conscious of my influences. T.H. White is very important for me.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.