The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

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.

It is straightforward — and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Amis is acutely, vibrantly sensitive to the different registers of laughter. He knows that it can be the most affirming and uniquely human sound, and also the most sinister and animalistic one. He understands every note of every octave that separates the liberating shout of mirth from the cackle of a bully or the snigger of a sadist.

At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.