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Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

I write plays about big, intense subjects.

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.

I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.