Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.