The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.

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

The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.

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.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

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.