It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true—unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has...

You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead...

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: ‘No hard feelings, everyone, but I’ve thought about it and it’s just not on, is it? It’s nearly...

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about...

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes – something I’ve been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible – what do they...

It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?

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

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They’re like poems in that respect, suicide notes:...

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they’re not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet...

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a...

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here. No one will protect you,...

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare...

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who...

Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The...

My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy ‘Money’ very quickly, and then I relaxed.

…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling...

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it...

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

Perché piangono gli uomini? Per colpa delle lotte e delle gesta e della maratona delle promozioni, perché vogliono la mamma, perché restano ciechi anche col passar del tempo, per colpa di tutte le erezioni che...

I am a novelist,

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

I hire tea by the tea bag.

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three...

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom...

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.

More will mean worse.

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed...

Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it’s heavy. Oh it’s hard. It isn’t easy. Jesus, I never...

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life