Therefore when I considered this carefully the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.

When a novel has 200 000 words then it is possible for the reader to experience 200 000 delights and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again perhaps more intensely.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel anything you read all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.