All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

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

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.