I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.

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

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

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.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'