Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move.

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How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.

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Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.

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The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it�s always the same beginning, and the same ending.

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Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time�s arrow moves the other way.

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It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can�t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.

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I used to think there was no time like the present. I used to think there was no time but the present. Now I know better�or different, anyway. In the end, the past will always be there. The past is all there is: the present never sticks around for long enough, and the future is anybody�s guess. In time, you always have to hand it to the past. It always gets you in the end.

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The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

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You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

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Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

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