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

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

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

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.