Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn't, so overall I feel blessed.

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.