Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.