It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

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