I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

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

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

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

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.