Things are not what they seem.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

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

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

The sweetest misery is that caused by love.

I always found I was in the best of company, alone.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

The reason you have what you have is because that is what you have decided to settle for right now. Change your mind, change your life.

It's like a dream to come to Spain and stay for a couple of years and get somebody to teach me Spanish music.

When I got divorced, I thought 'Well, there goes my act.'

I have never sought the reason why I write.

New York forces you to be in endless surreal situations.