The British audience was very important to me. I have always looked away from American to non-American audiences and so this was important.

I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.

Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.

It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.

I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.