Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.

There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.