Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

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

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.