Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Most of the boys would come with bits of equipment that their fathers had given them from their war days - helmets, canteens, binoculars, these kinds of things - that leant a kind of authenticity to the games we were playing. But, of course, my father never gave me anything. So I began to question him. You know, Why don't you have anything from the war? And I think he was...embarrassed to tell me he hadn't fought, because, you know, little boys want to turn their fathers into heroes, and he didn't want to be diminished in my eyes.

Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that's wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.