The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.

I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.