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As a writer, you live in permanent self-doubt; you're on permanent trial.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.