I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.