Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

I sometimes feel I'm a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

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.

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.