People are much more interesting than people realise.

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.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

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.