Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.