Painting is a matter of finding the right balance between consoling and reassuring the eye and challenging and disturbing the eye.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.

It's not just that toil allows the appearance of spontaneity. It allows the actuality of spontaneity.

Painting is a matter of finding the right balance between consoling and reassuring the eye and challenging and disturbing the eye.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.