Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose.

The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?