It's not the punch you expect that knocks you down.

Reading wasn't my religion - it was my oxygen.

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

I'm a really hectic dreamer, I never wake up not out of a dream and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises.

Revenge is so much more satisfying than regret.

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.