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I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.