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.

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

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.

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.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.