I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.