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

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.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

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.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.