I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there

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.

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.