Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.