Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven't got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose - why haven't I got it?

I hire tea by the tea bag.