I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

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

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.