I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience for novelty or for nostalgia but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.

I believe in a funny way the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

Great big serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great big serious novel and a funny novel the funny novel is doomed.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

The principle that certain sins should not receive the Church's testimony of forgiveness was probably no novelty at all but had been applied in various churches perhaps however with no strict consistency.

'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills or it won't work.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money to finance this earnest work and then I chucked it out.

As a novelist I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips but I fear it would be overly long.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.

Therefore when I considered this carefully the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.

When a novel has 200 000 words then it is possible for the reader to experience 200 000 delights and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again perhaps more intensely.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel anything you read all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.