What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.

My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.

One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn’t. You just end up thinking, who is this person?