I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

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

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.