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.

‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and...

Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.

You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger...

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.

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...

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...

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?

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.