As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.