Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I don't see myself as some kind of lone figure standing out there and doing my work in solitary splendour, but as part of the human condition and part of the continuum of writers.

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

What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?