With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.

Words his soul danced to.

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.

I write not to record what I think but to discover what I think

I've long come to the conclusion that when people say they can't put a book down, they don't mean they're interested in what's happening next; they mean they are so mesmerised by the writer's voice and the relationship that has been established that they don't want to break that. That's what I feel when I read, and I'm sure now that that's what's going on in the relationship between the reader and the writing.

I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.

With all those prizes the most interesting thing is getting on to the shortlist, because that tells you who people see as your peers.