...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

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

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.