It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.

I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.