I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

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.

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.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.