For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

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

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

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

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.