I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

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

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.