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I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.

I write - and then I write some more.

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

I do a lot of writing. People don't actually know how much writing really I do.