It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on.

Nothing to do with whelks, I suppose.

and I know this sounds trivial and I don’t care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don’t care about these awful people and I do care about this. It’s that the whole world...

It [fiction] allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you....

I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There’s some hollowness if they don’t.