Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.