Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war.

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

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.