The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

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

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.