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.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

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

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

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

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