I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.