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.

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

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.