My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

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.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.