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 have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.

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.

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.