But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.