It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

When you commit a serious doping offence you are not eligible for lottery funding.

I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

I always thought it better to allow myself to doubt before I decided, than to expose myself to the misery, after I had decided, of doubting whether I had decided rightly and justly.