Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.

Franz Kafka is a huge influence, more than the Grimms. To allow yourself to get into the coal bucket and fly to the sky ... we learned that from Kafka, that you can have a thought and make a body of it in this way.

As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.

There seems to me now to be the notion that you send something to a journal or an agent and months go by. It seems to me like that is a new piece of bad manners. Probably. Generally I assume that anything that happens now happened to Adam and Eve also.

Once you start on an idea it proliferates in itself.

I'm always amused by the way questions are asked. What did you intend? That's not even a recognizable verb. You don't intend when you write. You sit down and you're thinking things and dreaming things and someone says something and you think Ah! That's how it happens. Intention is not part of the game.

I don't go to the movies because they scare me. I don't like anything that is suspenseful, even pleasantly so.

I dare say you believe I'm going to die. I bet you don't believe you're going to die. You know it, but you don't believe it. Imaginatively, I think we find it impossible to believe we don't exist.

I'm very moved and very excited. And it just seems to me here are houses and trees and streets that feel so different from New York. I feel very attached to London I love it.

First book was handwritten, then the printing press, now we've got our Kindles. To be able to push a button and a dictionary comes up. And then, at my age, that I can make the letters any size I want, and that I can carry all of William Shakespeare, all of Gogol, all of Franz Kafka in my handbag? You've got to love it.

I'm not going to say it's laziness, but I'm not a grand creator of new characters.