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

Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.

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.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

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.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.