This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.