If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.