If there's one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.