I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.

I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness.

To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.

The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pampered enough myself to know how it can make your life too frictionless.

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

I still prefer going to the classical writers, the modernists and the nineteenth century writers. Much of what has been done since then has just been repetition. A lot of it is marvelous but the forms haven't changed.