I love research, and in fact it's liberating because you have to create your own world. No one can say "I've just got back from the 1860s, and you got it wrong." Anyway, it's fiction.

Endings are never neat, because when life goes on, there is no end. You may want to speculate about what the characters get up to afterwards, but I feel it would be presumptuous of me to dictate that.

Gypsies are, to say the least, underrepresented in literature and film.

If writers stuck to firsthand experience, novels would be pretty limited.

Whenever I pick up a book I think, "Tell me something I don't know."

I don't use real people for inspiration.

I despise this weakness in myself - this endless one-sided conversation that takes the place of action.