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" Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles. "

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" I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing that he hated more than anything else in life was spending money. And as soon as you leave your home, you're spending money. "

" The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten. "

" If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited. "

" It's one of these things that I've been struck by for so long about America. You know, this amazing politeness of American life that's not at all class specific. It's not like people get more polite as ascend the hierarchy of society. Just incredible good manners. It's always been something that I've noticed. "

" For me, those little cinemas in Paris where I saw many art films for the first time meant that cinema became a kind of pilgrimage site. "

" If you're not religious, like me, how do you explain the transformational power that certain places have? They bring an incredible degree of attention to where you are and the passage of time. You're looking at every flower twitching, wondering if it's just the breeze or some magical pulse. "

" I'm as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass. I've got too many ailments - left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist - in fact, the whole of the left arm. "

" When I'm writing, quite often I start having a good time when I see there's a chance to make myself look like a real jerk. I start chuckling and having an interesting, rather than a boring, time. "

Having A Good Time

" I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'the heart of a heartless world.' "

" There are the tears of rage when books get praised when they're so obviously garbage. But then there are so many more that continue to move me: the end of 'Paradise Lost,' 'The Ruined Cottage' by Wordsworth, Prospero's 'Our revels now are ended' speech near the end of 'The Tempest.' "

" I love festivals, period. "

" I don't read 'genre' fiction if that means novels with lots of killing and shooting. Even Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men' seemed pretty childish in that regard. "

" I didn't get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London. "

" It would be nice to turn off that incessant churning of consciousness. "

" People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value. "

" Have you ever stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai? I'd warmly recommend it. It's super luxurious, and right next door, there's a classic slum. So you can do a quick slum tour and get back to your sanctuary without any inconvenience but with some excellent snaps. "

" I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home. "

" I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like. "

" In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison. "

" I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it. "

" There's one profound difference between secular and religious pilgrimages. It's inconceivable that a Muslim would feel a sense of anticlimax when reaching Mecca. But for a secular pilgrim, the potential for disappointment is always there. "

" It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened. "

" I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14. "

" When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing. "