Quote

I tend to forget what I'm doing will ever be read while I'm writing it, and just get on with the task at hand.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.

The thing I'm always trying to do when I write is hit that sweet spot where the book both keeps you up late at night, and yet a week after you've finished, it still pops back into your head.

Especially if you're endeavouring daily to write your own books, you read with a degree of - well, it's hard to forget you're a writer when you're reading.

I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

I'm a sporadic reader. I have moments when I can't stop... then I kind of forget that I can read. But then I go, 'Oh God, yeah, books!'