The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.