My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.