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.

But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

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