London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.