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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" Not being boring is quite a challenge. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm quite good at not writing. "

" 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. "