Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other's good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to che….

Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry..

You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel..

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more.….

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, loneli….

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window..

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it..

I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before..

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and kno….

And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's ….

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some inv….

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one write….

I don't need new boots I got bluchers back down home. Eff the effing bluchers I'll buy you new adjectival effing elastic sided boots..

I don't think you have the right to shout about other people's private life..

Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apolo….

Living where I live New York I don't think anyone's going to make a fuss. But it is more deeply satisfying because it's of your place and means that ….

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame..

It's true: one of the things that I've always thought about American society is that you never get the sort of natural politicisation of class consci….

I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn't understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a ….