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

Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.

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.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

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