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

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" True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. "

" 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. "

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

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

" My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively. "

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

" 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. "

" What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" 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 often don't read reviews. "

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

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

" The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject. "

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

" Politics is the enemy of the imagination. "

" 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 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. "

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

" I don't hold grudges. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. "

" 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. "

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