The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.