Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.

He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.