To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.