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

I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.

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.

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.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.