You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people acc...
I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel...
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.
World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.
Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my own sensibilities, not by my melanin count.
One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.
There is never a typical week. I don't think I can live with a typical week.
I don't want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.
Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff without knowing where you will land.
Our censorship has sort of gotten a little too far. Too much censorship is just as bad as having none at all. Children need to be exposed to things, because if they don't see it, eventually, it's not like it's not going to happen, but it's just that ...
