It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

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