Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.