Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?

For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else.

Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.