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.

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

You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.