I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

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

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

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

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

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.