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.

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon.

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.