Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

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

I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?