I hope my books make statements about our general condition.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.

I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.