The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

I'm not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I'm 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle - that's what fiction is, and should be.

I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.