Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.