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" The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.' "

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" Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good. "

" It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective. "

" Anti-Semitism is extremely common. "

" Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man. "

" If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch. "

" Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed. "

" People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life. "

" The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists. "

" Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it. "

" I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher. "

" I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels. "

" The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational. "

" Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life. "

" It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics. "

" My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria. "

" I don't write books inadvertently. "

" In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all. "

" A busybody's work is never done. "

" I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them. "

" If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey. "

" Truth comes to us mediated by human love. "

" IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated. "

" I had lost faith in biography. "