I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or as Leibniz put it: ‘Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe’

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.