You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If Id listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.