You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.