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.
Deciding to write a novel about something – as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something – sounds to me like a good evocation of writer’s block.
It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.
At its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution.
You can’t be up the reader’s ass, as many a writer I think is – cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that’s not loving the reader in the right way. That’s toadying to the reader.
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice – registry offices, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the disposable diaper – is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
I hire tea by the tea bag.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn’t matter what creed or colour they are.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
We all have names we don’t know about.
When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.