What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

Then I fell in love and everything went to hell.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.