It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

[London] is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.

It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.