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Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

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.

I'm such a fangirl when it comes to other writers. I read 250 books a year, and I'm always talking up books by other authors.

The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.

I go to readings by fiction writers like Alice Walker, and I'm envious of the level of attention they generate.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.