Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved.

It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive. It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all.

Pillow talk. It’s how you know, it’s how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day -some night- I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not to just merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven’t already guessed that your future too, will be shared?

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of ‘everything belongs to everybody’ to increase because it means they don’t have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

If people read ‘Tomorrow’ and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a ‘rate of production,’ for whom it’s a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.

There are no compasses for journeying in time.

When something’s one thing, it’s not another.

I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.