When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

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

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

People look at fame and feel deprived if they haven't got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right. And also feel the same way about wealth, I suppose - why haven't I got it?

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.