You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Half my life is an act of revision.
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.
I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.
I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.
I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.
I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.
My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.