I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.