The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.

Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.

I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.

It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.

I think it can be quite impossible to think well of yourself, so I prefer not to think about that too much. But I am very pleased, obviously.

I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.

I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.