Literary critics make natural detectives.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

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.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.