If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

I think jogging is bad for your health. All that pressure on the knees and back cannot be good for you.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

I quizzed him a lot on this point and i suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don't have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it'll cause a stir. And when you're asked to explain afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense.