My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.