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Alan Moore's writing is almost novelistic. It's very intricate and wordy and smart.

A great speech is literature.

Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.

The book is called 'Most Talkative,' because I was voted most talkative in high school. And I've never stopped talking. My mouth has been my greatest asset and my biggest Achilles' heel.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you - almost seems to speak through you, in fact.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.