“What's the best part about writing a book?Finishing it.”
“You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it.”
“Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”
“Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.”
“It's difficult to teach how to write novels, but teaching swimming is just as hard.”