I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

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.

There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.

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

People are much more interesting than people realise.

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

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.