When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".