It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

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.

The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.