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With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.

I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.

Writing is much more satisfying on a certain level than acting ever was. Because you're not interpreting someone else's original idea, you can come up with your own.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.