Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.

The egotism of people who are eminent without being in the least distinguished and somehow feeling that's their due - that seems to me to be a peculiarly English phenomenon.

It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

As someone once said, covers to a novel are like bars to a cage. You can watch the tiger, the Komodo dragon, and admire it - its heart, its severity. Even when they carry out an ugly act, it's still fascinating.

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.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.