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I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.

T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot.

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

I've always loved the writing of Aaron Sorkin. He cleverly intersperses big issues alongside personal relationships.

I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.

I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way.

I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.