To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I'm writing them. For instance, when I was writing 'Doctor Dee,' I believed in magic. And when I wrote 'Hawksmoor' I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I'm back to being a complete blank again.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.