An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him - and that if he's lucky!

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.