Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.