In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

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.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

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

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

I am the worst judge of my books.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.