I have this lock of hair that keeps falling across my forehead. It drives me mad.

I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.

In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap - the literary world and the world of rock music.

With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.

Humankind can tolerate only so much rejection.