I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.