Statistically, you don't have much chance of becoming president if you're not tall and fairly handsome or at least conventional-looking.

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.

When I'm writing new material, I never have any trouble coming up with ideas.

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

Most romances aren't swept aside by big historical events. Most romances in the history of the world fall apart because of other, smaller happenings. History can sometimes be in the background, the thing which instead of rupturing your life merely irritates you by pressing itself now and then into the foreground.

Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh.

Politicians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what you see - what I see - is a group of people coming to the decisions they came to because something happened to them when they were nine-years-old, or because of some deep prejudice that formed in them subsequent to that.