When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.

You can't just have stuff that is free and escapist, you have to have stuff that is confrontational as well. You need stuff that is mystical but you need the realism too.

It's the UK: We have to get beyond that imperialist state. I think that kind of imperialist, hierarchical, elitist state has made it easier to basically shaft everybody in the country, which it's been doing for the last thirty years. It has also sort of made it more difficult for England to fulfill its destiny, which in my mind is creating a multi-ethnic, multicultural society that is truly at the head of that post-imperial commonwealth ideal. I think that that's what England should be and that that's the kind of nation we should be.

Most middle-class people I know don't really live like me. Middle-class people worry a lot about money. They worry a lot about job security, and they do a lot of nine-to-five stuff.

In civic life, I think that's where you can debate what is good taste and what is acceptable to other people, and what's gonna offend people. Do that there, but leave it out of art, because art is the one frontier that shouldn't have restraints put on it.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.