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'The Woman on the Train' just didn't sound as good. I'll take care next time not to have 'girl' in the title.

I was kind of broke . 'The Girl on the Train' was a last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

I always had a passion to write as a young girl.

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

Writers don't write about people they know. They write what they know about people.

You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself.

I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there's something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.