Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.

It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

It's been said that happiness writes white. It doesn't show up on the page. When you're on holiday and writing a letter home to a friend, no one wants a letter that says the food is good and the weather is charming and the accommodations comfortable. You want to hear about lost passports and rat-filled shacks.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.