Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we dont see her much on the political landscape in this country, shes kind of disappeared and she doesnt speak out much anymore.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.

Well, I like the rain before it falls.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.

I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.