Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Your heart is a powerful force. Use it consciously.

I can see your dirtypillows.

Feelings don’t follow rules. Guilt does. Fear does. But attraction? No way.

Without differentiation you have no brand

I don't pick on politicians. They ain't done nothin'.

The more rapidly the water moves, the lighter it seems.

I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

My coach has said to me, "When you win a match or a tournament, you don't even think about it - the very next minute you're like".

The most admirable method is that by which each wash of colour, large or small, is never disturbed. It admits of practically no overpainting, sponging or scrubbing. The colour stays where it is put.