By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

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.

It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

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.

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.