It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consciousness that you would get in the United Kingdom or even in Australia.

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

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

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life.

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.

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?

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.