The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant.

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.

You can only give things up once they start to let you down.

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.