Jonathan Dee

“I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.”

“I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.”

“Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers.”

“I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.”

“Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.”

“That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.”

“I am hopelessly devoted to paper. Nothing against e-readers of any sort - anything that keeps people reading is okay by me - but I am not, historically, an early adopter of such things.”

“The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.”

“It's nice to have something else going on when a book comes out so you're not just sitting by the phone, waiting for things to happen. You don't want to be the guy Googling himself all day.”

“I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.”

“More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.”

“What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?”

“You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.”

“John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.”

“The first draft often is really fast, and I'd be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.”

“I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.”

“New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.”

“I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.”

“When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.”

“Here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to go to a restaurant, take pictures of my food, download them, and call that a blog. That is beyond the pale. The Internet is such a bazaar of self-indulgences that I don't know why that particular one should bug me so much. But it really does.”