Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

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.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.