Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists.