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The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I don't really consider myself a writer.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.