Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child... It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had