In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

Good writing is always new.

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.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

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

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