A Very Beautiful Young Woman Once Asked

As A Bookish Adolescent, I Sopped Up Texts As If I Were Blotting Paper And They Were Fluid.

From Time To Time, As If Heaven-sent To Annoy, Someone Will Ask Me If I'm Self-disciplined When It Comes To My Work. I Usually Look Witheringly At Them And Snarl, 'what Do You Think?' I Mean, How Do You Imagine Anyone Writes A Quarter Of A Million Words A Year For Publication?

If The Government Announced That It Was Going To Allocate A Vast Tranche Of Education Funding Purely To The Pupils At The Best Public Schools, There Would Be A National Outcry - And Yet This Is Precisely What The Olympics Represents In Terms Of Sports Funding.

I'm Going To End Up Like One Of Those Old Weirdos Who Lives In A Network Of Tunnels Burrowed Through Trash - Yet I Do Not Fear This.

My Novels Tend To Come About From A Fusion Of Two Big Ideas, Creating A Critical Mass That Then Fissions, Throwing Off Hundreds Of Other Particles, Riffs, Tropes And Characters.