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

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

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.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.