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 thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.

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.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

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

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.