My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.

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 don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.