If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.

Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.

All tastes are expressions of belief.