The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

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