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

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

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

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

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

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

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.