People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.

All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge.

I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.

I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.