I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.
Had we settled in Pennsylvania, there's no way I would have written a Confederate novel.
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.
Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.
Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.
It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
