Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

In foreign countries, when people see what Donald Trump is saying on Twitter since the election and seeing what he's saying in these calls with foreign leaders, they take everything very seriously and they take everything very literally.

Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

Beware of clichés. Not just the ­clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought - even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are ­clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.