I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.