The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

I don’t know what’s the matter with me, why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.

Don't let two men fall in love with you, girls. It's not the sort of thing that ends well." -Uncle Charles

I would bet that the average teenager in this country has not used the word 'wisdom' in the past year

Love is only known by him who hopelessly persists in love.

Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.

If someone says, 'No, no, no, the earth is round!', they think this person is an extremist. That's what it's like for someone with my right-of-centre views working inside the BBC.

There's a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.

Time didn't pass; it tailgated.

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.