Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.

We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.