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When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

I don't very often read novels.

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.