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

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

I find people confusing.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.