All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.