The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

Often it doesn't occur to you what kind of novel you're writing until quite late on.

All that rejection from Republicans has a bit of a racist element. It was very necessary to have a black president, and it's been a great thing. It will help, in the end, to ease the trauma of slavery and civil war. The war against slavery cost almost 800,000 American lives - that's how strongly they felt about it. And it's not going to go away in a century.

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

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.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.