When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

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

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

What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.

The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.