The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

We are the star and the darkness it peirces

Midian is where the monsters go.

Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.

The extraordinary's the norm.

I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else - but I'm absolutely nothing special.