But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces,

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.