“I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.”

A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone.

I was more inclined to think of it as “writer’s impatience”, and to follow Arthur Koestler’s dictum: “Soak; and wait.

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside.

She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls.

I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

Ive learned never to try and force words to come.

… I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of “writer’s block”.

It isn’t like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there’s a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read Boneland.

At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.

It’s where I keep all my things. Get a lot of compliments on this.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.

You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.

Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven.

Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.

What he does with it, that’s something else, but he’s got it all. The talent, the instrument is there, that’s why he has endured.

Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.