I want my name to mean me.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.