“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”

“I think that maybe that's my weakness, in that I don't know how to do it, so I just do what I do and try to do it as passionately and as well as I can.”