I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

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.

Things are not what they seem.

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.

This is an Aston Martin, Gin.You don't run over dead bodies in an Aston Matin.""Tell that to James Bond

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong.

Parents must get across the idea that "I love you always, but sometimes I do not love your behavior."

Writing is not a profession, occupation or job; it is not a way of life: it is a comprehensive response to life.

If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops.

Certain artists have a role to echo the echoes of the people and that's what I'll be doing on my next album.

. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.