That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors don't believe in autonomy. And in the end, perhaps that idea of interconnectedness is a moral position.

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.