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Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.

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.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I'm obsessed with books. When a good book hits me, it's all I can think about and all I can do.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

I'm obsessed with books.