A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

Love means having something to betray.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.