I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

All men are born free: just not for long.

In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.