I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!
I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.
Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.
... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.