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One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.