Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

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

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.