‘The written word is not like a conversation. There is a time gap between the stimulus and the response. I need that time, to consider what I think, and compose what I say. So I write and rewrite.’
'The days of the monocultured genre writer is long gone, if it ever really existed. Writers carry a gloriously untuned choir of voices in their heads.'
'The worst thing about that first rejection wasn't that I'd been turned down by Oxford, it was that it made me reject my own impulse to write. I had, in effect, rejected myself.'