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.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

Literature is the voice of the human heart.