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.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

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

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