One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

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