My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.

I believe this was [Margaret Thatcher] estimate of the voter: "These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household."

Those who are made can be unmade.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.