Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.