I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that’s always been there, and the next minute it’s just a memory.

On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I’m very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of...

I wouldn’t use the word ‘man’. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it...

I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.

Most books are surplus to the world’s requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren’t just using up trees.

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.

One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional… Maybe that’s a strong word, but how obsessive I am.

Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They’re in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country....

I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875’s lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it.

I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.

My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I’m in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with...

And you know what people immediately start looking for, five minutes after they arrive someplace new? You know what’s on their minds? I’ll tell you: How are they gonna get laid, and where are they...

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.

When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.

Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.

I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, ‘We’ve got this book. I don’t really get it, but we paid for it, so we’ve got to...

I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I’m in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.

People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to...

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt...

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow...

I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.

Of course it’s fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who’ve never met me, who don’t know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography:...

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one’s attitude.

When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can’t follow them.

Very good,” said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for...

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven’t nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to...

Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph:...

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are ‘procedures in place.’

Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We’re not going...

I’m a loner and always have been.

So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I’m past all that.

A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the...

Hoy día, su vida se asemeja más bien a un periódico: sin sentido, al día y lleno de sucesos disparatados.

‘A Christmas Carol’ is an extravagantly symbolic thing – as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

I’m still tremendously proud of ‘Crimson Petal.’ I’m still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.