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.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

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.

I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go.

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.