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.

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.