I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think the definition of a book is changing.
I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.
There is nothing I would change - to change it I would have had to write a totally different book.
Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.