I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.