Do you know what love is?... It is whatever you can still betray.

Survival ... is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

Betrayal can only happen if you love.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I’ve sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That’s the saddest thing of all, because they’re locked up and no one else can make them.

I happen to write by hand. I don’t even type.

Yet it’s not for want of future that I’m here, he thought. It’s for want of a present.

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?