As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.
I am a compulsive writer.
I'm a very conceptual writer.
I am not a consecutive writer.
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.
It wasn't a decision to become a writer. I wanted to become a writer of crime fiction. I was very specific.
Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
I'm a writer, so I like dissecting things.
My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.
Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
