“But to anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.”

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”

“I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour".”

“Underneath my outside faceThere's a face that none can see.A little less smiley,A little less sure,But a whole lot more like me.”

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”