I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic - you want all those inequalities, because that's what makes life interesting.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

There isn't what my father called the cruising hostility of the English press - where they're looking around for something to attack. You don't feel that there's a great reservoir of resentment in the press as you do in England.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.

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