I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?