A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.