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I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.

I hate that word dysfunction.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.

I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.

I feel as if I've been so inured to failure, because I fail more than I succeed. As with any kind of fiction, I throw out so many pages; I get rejected so many times.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.