“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”

“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose...”

“The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.”

“My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will...”

“People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of y...”

“You know that feeling when you first arrive in a new city? However tired you are, however shattered by the flight, you are impatient to get out and sample the streets, the life, the action.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.”

“If love is like a possession, maybe my letter are like my exorcisms”

“I had fallen too far. I was in love with Rush Finlay.”

“It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.”

“It is the human earthling who tends to dominate the earth, oftentimes treating other fellow earthlings and living beings as mere objects. This is what is meant by 'speciesism'. By analogy with raci...”

“Documentary evidence says where there is smoke there is fire, be it holy smoke or otherwise.”