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.