I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God...

You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you're never going to match up and that everybody else's life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day, or you were somehow not invited. And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you.

Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.