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Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.