I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.