I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.