A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

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

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

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

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.