Occupation: Novelist Birth: August 19, 1961
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history..
I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood..
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting….
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels..
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, ….
Well, I like the rain before it falls..
I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it'….
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political..
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relation….
The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's..
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it..
Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough awa….
My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from ….
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over w….
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was pickin….
Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world..
The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eye….
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are..
Objectivity is just male subjectivity..
We say, 'Shall we meet for a drink?', as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so s….