You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.