I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.

You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

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

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.