When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.