When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

when the sky is as grey as this - impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour - and the stooped millions lift their heads, it's hard to tell the air from the impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.