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When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers.

The funny thing is, I'm not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.

I think that if you write what you love to read, that will be what your audience wants to read, too.

Also, most people read fiction as an escape - and I wonder whether my books aren't a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

I suppose people might consider me a 'loose' reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.