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,