My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.