Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

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.

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.