My writing is full of lives I might have led.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.