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.

Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vindictively snap off wing mirrors on cars when they were trying to cross in front of the car at a danger to motorists and pedestrians.

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.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

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

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.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.