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Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

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It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So...more

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I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that wri...more

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Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

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Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six ...more

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The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

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They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever re...more

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Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

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I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British wr...more

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Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

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He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

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The words come at my call but who calls whom?

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I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

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I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has ...more

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Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.