Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

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.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.