Quote

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

As a child, I loved story books and wanted to be in them so desperately and live the stories.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

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.

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.