What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.