My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I’m in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.

People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to...

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt...

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow...

I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.

Of course it’s fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who’ve never met me, who don’t know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography:...

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude.

When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can’t follow them.

Very good,” said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for...

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven’t nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to...

Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph:...

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are ‘procedures in place.’

Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We’re not going...

I’m a loner and always have been.

So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I’m past all that.

A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the...

Hoy día, su vida se asemeja más bien a un periódico: sin sentido, al día y lleno de sucesos disparatados.