Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.