“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”

“If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.”

“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.”

“you like to have some cup of tea?-July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.”