Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

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

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

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

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.