For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.

While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

That form is very freeing, ... It's a great relief for the novelist not to have to be there in the way a third-person narrator implies. If you get rid of all that -- that judging entity -- you just leave the character alone with the reader.

I do not need to have a control group, a placebo or a degree to be an applicator of knowledge.