I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life.

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise — the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.