I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.