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" I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text. "

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" I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way. "

" I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.' "

" Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people - if you're not those things, you probably don't choose this adventure - and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends. "

" After years of working on books, I eventually took a more business-oriented job, for the same sorts of reasons that most people take most new jobs: fancier title, higher pay, opportunities for advancement. "

" As a book editor, you need to pitch every one of your books again and again, dozens of times, for months on end. From a quick conversation with your boss or a letter that'll be read by just one person, to a five-minute speech in front of 50 colleagues or cover copy that'll be in front of millions of eyes. "

" Any setting can be a good setting for a novel. "

" After college, I was burdened with student loans to repay, no financial cushion, so I wasn't in a position to bet everything on a creative-writing career - neither the writing-workshop academia life nor the freelance-writer version, trying to scrape by on short stories and house-painting gigs. "

" I live in Greenwich Village in New York City, but I rarely write at home, where there's too much else to do. "

" Nearly all of us work, a lot: many people spend more waking hours working than doing all other things combined. And nearly all of us spend our lifetimes working for someone other than ourselves. "

" Everyone has secrets, and I think some people flee from home - far from home - to try to keep those secrets. "

" There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors. "

" When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a copy editor at Doubleday, and for a brief period, it was my job to help shepherd Pat Conroy's 'Beach Music' into the world. "

" Eventually, I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that's what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world. "

" I'd sometimes go to Paris by myself - it was an easy two-hour train ride - to get a break from the everyday grind, to walk around a big city, ride a subway, feel the energy of a world capital. "

" 'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp. "

" A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?' "

" One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature. "

" I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes. "

" We all live in a universe in which we're either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them. "

" What is it we want out of travel? Is it to take snapshots of ourselves in front of famous monuments, surrounded by other tourists? To eat unfamiliar food chosen from unintelligible menus? To earn frequent-flier miles? No. It's to glimpse what life is like somewhere else. "

" Sometimes, I had very little - if any - idea for whom I was really working: at the end of the day, who reaped the profits? Was it a privately controlled German foundation or a global array of stockholders? A middle-class guy on the Upper West Side or Rupert Murdoch? Were we pursuing mere profit, or self-perpetuation, or something bigger? "

" I know that 'The Accident' is not a completely accurate reflection of the reality of the book publishing world, which, like nearly any other business, consists mostly of people sitting in small offices staring at computer screens or reading or trying to stay awake in meetings. "

" Writing is a solitary occupation; we don't really have any colleagues. "