I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.