The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.'

Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.

I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about... the world I live in.

Winter sports aren't my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses.