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[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

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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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Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

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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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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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Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physic...more

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The words come at my call but who calls whom?

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It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in o...more

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Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

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

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A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

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...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.