Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

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.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

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

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.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.