Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.

I've always said that the big difference between South America and North America with regard to the native population is that in North America they raped them and killed them, and in South America they raped them and married them. The mix was much greater, and that was very good.

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.

We have a huge institution that celebrates the undistinguished, an institution which is nearly as old as the Papists. It's been going on for millennia. What else is a monarchy but a series of ridiculously exalted figures who are not necessarily distinguished at all? In fact, they have a rather philistine tradition. So perhaps we are more vulnerable to it than other countries.