Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

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.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

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

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.