Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity

Memory narrativises itself.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.