Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

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

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

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

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.