Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.