When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

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

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

The egotism of people who are eminent without being in the least distinguished and somehow feeling that's their due - that seems to me to be a peculiarly English phenomenon.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.