The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

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.

I hire tea by the tea bag.

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.