If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.

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

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

There's a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer's views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

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