If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.