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

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" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "

" By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage. "

" What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring. "

" One has to have the courage of one's pessimism. "

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

" A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew. "

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

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

" 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 don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force. "

" The moment you have children and a mortgage you want things to work; you're locked into the human project and you want it to flourish. "

" Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. "

" 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. "

" I often don't read reviews. "

" The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy. "

" It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we're responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it's no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in. "

" 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. "

" You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. "

" 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. "

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. "

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

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

" I don't hold grudges. "