I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write..

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books..

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers..

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently..

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught ….

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has..

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not..

In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate h….

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about..

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid….

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude..

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers..

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful..

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying..

Good writing is always new..

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm..

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay o….

…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have..

Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which….

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in..

For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am ….