For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

Those who are made can be unmade.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.