... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.