Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.