The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct..

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely..

You are a pool of clear water where the light plays.

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trum….

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books bec….

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth..

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the….

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.….

I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first..

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough..

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for….

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's….

If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us..

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously..

I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all..

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world..

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes,….

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun..

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently..

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is bet….

One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal. The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the nation….