In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a….

I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical..

The best years are when you know what you're doing..

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody..

It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior….

No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his….

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawy….

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small..

Freud was just a novelist..

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommod….

I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Pe….

I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a f….

When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled tha….

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding..

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines..

I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed..

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive..

I never read in bed, only in my study..

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books..

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely fo….

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade..