It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.