The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.