I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.