You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.