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

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

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

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

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