The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.