Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

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