I had lost faith in biography.
If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.
Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'
Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
I don't write books inadvertently.
Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
