Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

Good writing is always new.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.