The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That I think is valuable. In terms of actually tweeting myself, I have just lost enthusiasm for it. Maybe I'll do some of it this week to tell people about the PEN Festival and encourage them to show up.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.