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Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.