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

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

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.

All the things we achieve are things we have first of all imagined.

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.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region.