‘I want to recognise the habitual, but not be numbed by it; to retain both first and lasting impressions of a place. It requires both sufficient experience to write with authority, and distance to write with liberty, and without betrayal.’

‘Success’ in literature, a field defined as perhaps no other by setbacks and reversals, can take many forms and arise in the least expected of places.

’Visiting a foreign city leaves me fantasising about what it would be like to cloak myself in another identity and live in another world’

Hone and hone that draft till the story emerges, the way a sculpture emerges from what was once a block of stone.