What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

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.

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.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

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.