All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.