I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

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

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.