Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.
I’m not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I’m 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle – that’s what fiction is, and should be.
Don’t dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.
These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you’re trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic – you want all those inequalities, because that’s what makes life interesting.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected – you write about it after it’s over.
Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father’s peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on ’defamatory.
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.
The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was ‘better’ than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.
Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
I think a lot of people who read fiction are interested in subtlety. But they wouldn’t like my stuff. It’s a bit too violent for many tastes.