Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels.