Quote

When you spend seven years of your life working on something that you're really passionate about, and other people end up loving it, too, that just makes all of the work worthwhile.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

The only reason that it takes me seven years to do stuff is because I just don't really have a plan.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

While writing, I'm always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, 'I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.'

I'm pretty social so it's hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write.

After a while, you just don't do things you don't wanna do - that's the great freedom you get, the older you get. You learn what to do and what not to do, and what will be a waste of time and what won't be a waste of time.

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.