I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

There's nothing the British like better than a bloke who comes from nowhere, makes it, and then gets clobbered.

To hear the Treorchy Male Choir in full throat is one of the great joys of choral music.

Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

Occasionally now I feel a wang that goes in my head - once you've got it you've got it. The [illness] was quite severe, leaving me deeply unhappy and frightened.

When anybody tells you something about writing, somebody will tell you something completely different and they will also be right

More people now work in the arts than the steel, coal and car industries combined.

Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.

Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.

Pretty Stones

It is better to own 10% of an elephant than 100% of a rat.

Everybody thinks the Bushes are from Texas. I've been there twice.

Songwriting is the cheapest psychiatrist I know.

In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.

Machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats and therefore can never be consciously or even unconsciously biased.

A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman. All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.

If all the time consumed in attending dinners and luncheons was consumed in some work, the production of this country would be doubled