"Broadly, my philosophy of writing the novel is that sentence by sentence, you let everything in. You picture yourself as a person in a very small untrustworthy boat way out in the middle of the ocean with a giant net, and every pull you make to bring it in, whatever you’ve caught, threatens to capsize you, but everything in that net belongs there. Then, at a certain stage, sentence by sentence, you start to say, 'Maybe not this one, maybe not that one.'"