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

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

I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.

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.

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.

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.