If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

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.

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.