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

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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.

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

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

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