A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn't know you knew.

Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them and not just say, 'Oh they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal.

As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Everything we do has consequences.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.