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.

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....

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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...

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.