Cruelty is not a literary value.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.