The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal.
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.
I am no Poet here; my pen's the spout where the rain water of my eyes run out.
I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.
The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.
The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all.
I cannot sing the old songs now! It is not that I deem them low, 'Tis that I can't remember how They go.
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sin.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.
I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.
I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me.
I am neither a child, a young man, nor an ancient; nor am I of any caste.
