Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.
You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.
Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.
In the concordance of Nicola Six’s kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla – chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
I can imagine in a century or two that rule by women will be seen as a better bet than rule by men. What’s wrong with men is that they tend to look for the violent solution. Women don’t.
I sometimes feel I’m a sort of cult writer, rather than a mainstream writer, in that those who like my stuff like it a lot, but the appeal is not that broad.
Addictions do come in handy sometimes: at least you have to get out of bed for them.
He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.
When I talk about the pleasure principle, I don’t say there is only one kind of pleasure, there are many kinds of pleasure. Some pleasure is difficult. It should be for the reader as well as the writer. But it has to be pleasure.
It is terrible to see someone being beaten up by the English language.
The satirist isn’t just looking at things ironically but militantly – he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world.
When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
I would say I’m an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial. Which is a technique of science fiction, apart from anything else.
Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
My theory is – we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.
Often it doesn’t occur to you what kind of novel you’re writing until quite late on.
No-one is going to sit down and read Bleak House to the family any more, but they can all huddle up happily in front of Charles Bronson.
I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice – the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.