The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

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