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

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

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.

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.