I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.