“If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.”

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

I couldn’t be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

in writing, sex doesn’t matter; it’s the writing that matters.

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.

I shall never write an autobiography, I’m much too jealous of my privacy for that.

From Ernest Hemingway’s stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Hang on, did you just call me angel? I asked. If i did? I dont like it. He grinned. It stays. Angel. He leaned across the table, raised his hand to my face, and brushed his thumb along one corner of my mouth. I pulled away, too late.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

Ay Dad, brush my hair one time. Hey pops! Come brush my hair.

We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

Life gets so ridiculous, you just have to brush it off like sand and laugh. I think the laughter is good medicine for crap-itis.

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.