Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.