With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

People ask 'How do you get so eh-ish?' I don't know if it's just because so much of my family still lives in Canada and I finished studies up there.

If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.

I was well indulged as a child by my relentlessly self-improving, working class parents to express myself.

I am lucky in that I love what I do, but it can still be hard to be away from the kids for long lengths of time. At the end of the day, all I want is to be with my kids, but it's worth it to create a future for my family.