When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

I wrote an outline. I wrote a rough draft. And then I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. And that's the way you were supposed to write plays.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.