I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.