It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.

When I vacate this sack of old bones I won't care what you do with it. Bury or burn it but don't make much fuss.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I don't want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness.