I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

'Darling, whisky' was my own first utterance--and I thought, none of your namby-pamby Caribbean aphrodisiac nonsense.

Writing in the first person can be claustrophobic--everything that happens in the book is notionally filtered through the narrator, and one can long for the fresh air of another perspective. One can luxuriate in the peculiar world of a character, but there are limitations. Ironizing that person's experience is difficult. You need perhaps a candid old friend of the narrator who can tell a few truths the narrator prefers to ignore.

Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child. I hated the idea of being in the wrong and dreaded being punished. Everyone at my prep school was being beaten by the headmaster with the back of a hairbrush round the clock, and I was keen to avoid that. It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

We talked--hours of particular, loving banalities. I insisted on how his opinions mattered, and developed and construed his platitudes into apercus he was far from entertaining himself. Because I was in love with him, and had brought him out, I believed in a core of redeemable talent and goodness in him.

I've increasingly been interested in leaving gaps and unresolved elements within a novel, trying to escape from the model of the novel as something in which there is a secret that, when revealed, will make all clear. It seems to me too unlike life, too convenient, too fictional.

All his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

Perhaps one is never as excited by anything as much as one's first book, because then everything is potential.

Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made.

I tend to have some significant plot resolution just before the end, and then a coda that leaves things in the air. I think it's a way of returning the novel to life, of saying that there are always things beyond the shape and scope of the novel.