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Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

Books have the power to be the light we are seeking at crucial moments in our lives. Reading helps us realize we are not alone, that we can change our circumstances and even achieve the impossible.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Especially if you're endeavouring daily to write your own books, you read with a degree of - well, it's hard to forget you're a writer when you're reading.