One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.