Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

In Germany, they were very interested in talking about their past. I respect that, and I think they've done quite well. It's become a kind of obsession, as it bloody well should, when compared, for example, to France, which hasn't done anything. France has done no work about their part in transporting eighty thousand people to their deaths. They are still the guy in the leather jacket with the onion, who's a part of La Résistance. In fact, they collaborated, not resisted.

I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn't like my stuff. It's a bit too violent for many tastes.

It's tremendously important how you get on with the other sex. Your life record on that is incredibly important. You never really think about any of your other achievements.

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.

You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.

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