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I have tried to explore the little talent I have for writing.

There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.

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

I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.

I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.