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

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

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

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

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

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

" I often don't read reviews. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. "

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

" I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. "

" 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. "

" When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

" I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "