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Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.

Writing is a creatively rewarding occupation but for me very time consuming.

My interest in words and literature is always changing. And every day of work is different, and it doesn't feel laborious in the way that, say, washing dishes did. I'm quite happy to be doing what I'm doing, and I feel very lucky.

Actually, I've never thought myself as being a particularly hard worker. I've always worked, and I guess my mind is busy all the time. I've been in a lot of things just because of my own intellectual curiosity.

Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

Writing is hard work: it is like doing homework for the rest of your life. You are always chipping away at it.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.