Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.'

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

I want to be an art-hero - I want to change the form of the novel.

If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.

The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.