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" I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. "

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" I often don't read reviews. "

" It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. "

" Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves. "

" I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.' "

" London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right. "

" I was an intimate sort of child who never spoke up in groups. I preferred close friends. "

" Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god. "

" My father's drinking was sometimes a problem. And a great deal went unspoken. He was not particularly acute or articulate about the emotions. But he was very affectionate towards me. "

" I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress. "

" What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike? "

" Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It's a little easier if you've got a god to forgive you. "

" You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan. "

" Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater. "

" As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be. "

" I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time. "

" I wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don't play the guitar. "

" I don't really believe in evil at all. "

" If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy. "

" I don't hold grudges. "

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me. "

" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

" In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. "

" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "

" Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race. "

" Reading reviews makes you thin-skinned. It's like waves washing layers off your skin. "

" I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building. "

" We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences. "

" You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. "