the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.

It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.