There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

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

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

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

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.