“And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.”

“I mean, it's like we all get our raw materials from our families―but it's up to us whether we build bridges or bombs.”

“We all fictionalize ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. For some it is a soap opera, for others an epic, but, for all of us, it's an ongoing narrative that we constantly manipulate and reshape, improving (like the best anecdotes) in the retelling. This is not just true of writers. The story is one of the key ways we define and order our experiences as human beings: how we tell ourselves and others who we are.(from the Daily Telegraph)”

“It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”

“There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is.I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.”

“We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.”