When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don't say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

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.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence of vulgarity, the wallowing in vulgarity. As with everything English, there's a sort of irony to it. They write a great deal about these trivial people who have a certain eminence, always with a bit of, "Isn't it ridiculous that we are writing about this person?"

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.