I cannot make my days longer so I strive to make them better.

The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That's happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn't like it.

People who don't read books a lot are threatened by books.

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

You may not know it but I'm no good at coping with all the attention in the luxury hotels I sometimes find myself in.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.