If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.