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...