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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.