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

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.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.

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