A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.

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.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

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