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

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.

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

I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.

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

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.