I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can't understand, can and can't accept.

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.