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.

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

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

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

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.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.