"Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schoo..." — Martin Amis

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.