Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

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

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)