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To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

A book is a book is a book.

At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't.

I think of every book as a single entity, and some have later gone on to become a series, often at the request of readers.

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.