“Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned ar”

“Selling cookies helped me to realize that you needed to have a certain way to communicate with people. You also needed business skills. You knew you needed to sell a certain amount of boxes, so that gave me some business sense.”