No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.