All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

You love someone, you've got to let something go.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.