Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

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

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

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.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.