All the things we value in society don’t mean much in fiction.
Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions.
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.
You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren’t many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can’t work.
He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.
For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound.
My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
Laughter always forgives.
Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
The literary interview won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I’m in a funk about it, I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
More will mean worse.
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.
Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist – in other words, my mother did it all.
It’s an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That’s an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise – except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.