And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.