Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

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.

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?'

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

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.

A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.

As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.

I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth. She’s hiding hers away, but at the same time she wants me to see it.

I love the sound of the wind in the trees and the song of the birds and the shuffle in the leaves of my many woodland friends.

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."

Everyones childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand.

If it ought to be done, then apply yourself to it strenuously

Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation.

I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.