Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

No emotion is the final one.

It's not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this [ebooks] is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

It doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.