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I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

Don't tell your stories to anyone. You'll be more motivated knowing it's a prerequisite to having an audience.

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'

I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.