We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.