There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.

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

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.

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.

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.

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

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.