There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

The kitten was six weeks old. It was enchanting, a delicate fairy-tale cat, whose Siamese genes showed in the shape of the face, ears, tail, and the subtle lines of its body. [...] She sat, a tiny thing, in the middle of a yellow carpet, surrounded by five worshipppers, not at all afraid of us. Then she stalked around that floor of the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.

I never stopped reading.

September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.