I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

We write to discover what we think.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.