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

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.

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

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

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".