There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply:the person who wants to read what I have written.

The eminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet - big deal.

I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.

In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions o…

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman 'other' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of …