I was no good at being a child.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

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

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.