Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.

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.

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.

For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.