For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.