Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

The satirist isn't just looking at things ironically but militantly - he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.