Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

God save us from people who mean well.

The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.