All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

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

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

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.

Style isn't something added on; it's intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.