Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

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.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.