I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

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

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

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.