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.

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.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

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

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?

Murderers will try to recall the sequence of events, they will remember exactly what they did just before and just after. But they can never remember the actual moment of killing. This is why they will always leave a clue.