I am not a particularly natural writer. I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers do. For me, it's sentence by sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It's a very laborious process, but I love doing it.

The idea of a flip book still really appeals to me. That idea of fiction and non-fiction.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.