I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.