This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.