My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.