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.

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

Life should be embraced like a lover.

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.

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.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

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