It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves...I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.

My life is devoted to self-delusion - and I have a great capacity for that - but it's the thing that gives me the most pleasure, so I can't complain about it.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.