It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped.

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.