As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience.

It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.