He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

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

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

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

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.