The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

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

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.

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.