Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

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

The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.