In the '80s, the world I was living in wasn't this world of consumption. There wasn't that much to buy, really. Actually I'm still struck by that. There's not an awful lot of stuff I want. Somebody quotes Diogenes, who's walking around saying, "How many things there are in the marketplace of which Diogenes has no need." I always feel that. Except of course when you're living in Venice, California and you see all these lovely houses!

Whatever people may say about my books - and it always amazes me when people don't like them, but sometimes they don't - the epigraphs have always been top-drawer. I think having that at the outset protects me from a lot of potential problems.

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche's claim when he says, "Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind." Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.

I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.

For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me.