Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

In principle I'm an atheist, although in fact I have a lot of faith

Never trust he who trusts everyone.