How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the ….

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the r….

Slightest accidents open up new worlds..

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious proc….

When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfoldin….

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that..

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to….

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark..

The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody's house, what's better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody's ever going to say, "Can I see the i….

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar..

I like to think the price I paid by being open about my private life helped..

Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, yo….

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the icon….

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other..

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness..

A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If ….

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together dis….

What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?.

Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making ….

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed..