The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.