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.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

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

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?