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

If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.

The egotism of people who are eminent without being in the least distinguished and somehow feeling that's their due - that seems to me to be a peculiarly English phenomenon.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.

Let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.

In Germany, they were very interested in talking about their past. I respect that, and I think they've done quite well. It's become a kind of obsession, as it bloody well should, when compared, for example, to France, which hasn't done anything. France has done no work about their part in transporting eighty thousand people to their deaths. They are still the guy in the leather jacket with the onion, who's a part of La Résistance. In fact, they collaborated, not resisted.

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.