Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'

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.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn’t you say?

The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

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.

London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sit-coms, soaps and squibs, walking round hand in hand.