It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it.

The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.

I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.

Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.