It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

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

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.