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

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.

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."

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

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 could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.