As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

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

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously "creative".

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.