All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.