What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

My upbringing was absolutely not the archetypal writer's upbringing. Even, arguably, the opposite.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk 'round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.