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One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

Everything in my life affects my writing. There are no separate parts of my life.

I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.

Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge.

For me, one of the privileges of being a writer is to poke your nose around and learn about worlds you don't know.

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.

As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.