Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

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