I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.