The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.