Whatever people may say about my books - and it always amazes me when people don't like them, but sometimes they don't - the epigraphs have always been top-drawer. I think having that at the outset protects me from a lot of potential problems.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

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.

In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

Like most writers I spend a lot of my time sort of thinking, "It's such agony, I can't do it."

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen.