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.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

I want my name to mean me.

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.

I find people confusing.