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

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

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

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All faces are unique, and this is exhilarating, despite the increasingly plastic similarity of TV stars and actors.

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