There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.