All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

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

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.)

Laughter always forgives.

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.