My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.

I don't think I've ever frightened myself before when writing, but there were areas where there was terror, as though I was looking into somewhere that I didn't know existed before, and it frightened me.

As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.