I'd been coming to New York for weekends since I was 17, and after 9/11, I started making these trips more frequently, just to make contact with the city.

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.

I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer.

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

Family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.

There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.

Proper British nannies put the child ahead of everything. They do not like to see children used as accessories, carried around in slings for the convenience of the parents' social life. They want a proper set-up, where the baby is rested and happy, not shown off to all-comers.