At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from...

‘Crash’ is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We’re distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal...

My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped.

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to...

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

To my child’s eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of...

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There’s a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?

One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set… the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it… could be...

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

The Internet is an amazing development.

I’ve seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You’ll no longer be an external spectator to fiction...

There are signs, I think, that people aren’t satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be.

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

There are some people, who place enormous value on their home and feel that it defines them, that a stain on the carpet is a personal defilement. There are others, and I think I am...

The dream of empire died when Shanghai surrendered without a fight. Even at the age of 11 or 12, I knew that no amount of patriotic newsreels would put the Union Jack jigsaw together again....

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink...

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.

A reality that is electronic… Once everybody’s got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there’ll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far...

Orwell’s ‘1984’ convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and...

There’s a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art – I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been...

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.

Looking back, it puzzles me that my parents decided to stay in Shanghai when they must have known that war was imminent. But the cotton works were my father’s responsibility, and duty then counted for...

What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.

Burroughs called his greatest novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ by which he meant it’s what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It’s very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole...

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about...

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille,...

My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn’t until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of ‘The Violation’ by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist...

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses...

Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is ‘boring.’ The future is going to be boring.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual...

The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing....

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Chums Annual.’ At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because...

I was born in the city’s general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club,...

I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the...

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.

Even one’s own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about one’s home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and...

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the...

I think it’s terribly important to watch TV. I think there’s a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of...

I’ve decided to recast myself as Utopian. I like this landscape of the M25 and Heathrow. I like airfreight offices and rent-a-car bureaus. I like dual carriageways. When I see a CCTV camera, I know...