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It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.

I had novels to write, so I wrote them.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.