I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

I wonder why do wars suddenly start and suddenly stop, and why do we Brits and you Americans get involved in some of them and not in others? Is it possible that the arms manufacturers quietly foment wars without us knowing? Dropping bombs is a very profitable business for them. Gore Vidal was talking about this the other day, and he made a lot of sense. Whenever American policy seems inscrutable, he said, remember the military-industrial complex. He's the one who should have been President.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.