Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.
While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk.
I’m afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There’s no going back.
I don’t think I’d like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It’s a fantastic sight – every time, it awes me.
Let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.
There’s a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer’s views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark – spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who’s doing all the moving.
It is straightforward – and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn’t sure what it was.
One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.
You can’t sort of write the novel as if you’re taking dictation from heaven.
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don’t feel the deeper rhythm there. I don’t think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it’s the only way they can write.
What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly scared of death – but scared of dying, the process. It doesn’t seem to be a good way of doing it.
But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.
My belief is that everything that’s written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn’t take any notice of it.