Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.