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" Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors, and their toes are going to curl up. "

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" I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist. "

" When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world. "

" I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart. "

" Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much. "

" You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano. "

" I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is. "

" Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book. "

" Retiring from writing is not to retire from life. "

" I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes. "

" As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep. "

" When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative. "

" Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case. "

" There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans. "

" I invent words you think you've heard - spray hopper or swag beetle. "

" I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me. "

" I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day. "

" For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese. "

" I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go. "

" Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands. "

" I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage. "

" The problems of the world are not going to be engaged with and solved in Faversham, they're going to be sorted out in cities like Birmingham. "

" I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion. "

" My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes. "

" I have tested my nerve by reaching a little too closely toward a lengthy alligator on the Gulf Coast and a saucer-sized tarantula in a Houston car park. "