We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.