Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

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

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.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.

I think it's likely that the civilizing effect of literature has done most of the work, and still continues to do. Look at Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It proves beyond any shadow of doubt that violence has declined dramatically throughout the centuries. There are various reasons for it: the rise of the state, Leviathan, the monopoly of violence, children's rights, animal rights. They're all positive signs.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.