The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it’s all right, it...

If someone’s a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.

You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last judgement, 100% less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?

The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the...

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us – we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms – we have a little...

Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.

The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after ‘The Crimson Petal’s publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.

She talks about being a Christian as if it’s a gym membership you can sign up for.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That’s very likely to happen to my books, and if I’m extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

I’m constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won’t make sense...

For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.

The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors.

But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God…is...

In all of my work, I think I’m exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

I don’t remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.

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

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

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...

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

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...

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.

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...

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:...

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

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.