Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it.

I love online gambling.

For all of the incredible messages I've received about how my visibility is helping people, those people who I follow on social media still receive daily death threats and the most derogatory, inhumane vitriol.

The first time I was homeless was when I went to Atlanta. I was in a homeless shelter, then when I got a job I used to miss the curfew for the shelter. So I ended up sleeping outside in the streets.