My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

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.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.