All Quotes

Do we change every time we have a new encounter? Are we endlessly mutable? I think these are fascinating questions: it's a rich vein to tap, and I don't think I have exhausted it fully yet. ”

I tend to admire dead people more than the living. All too often, human reality diminishes the glowing reputation. ”

Human beings are interested in the human condition. ”

At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on year? Because it really is getting harder. ”

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close. ”

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it. ”

To live as an artist requires hard work or some extraordinary good fortune to come your way. ”

In some ways, you could argue, television is doing far more interesting work than the movies. It's more fulfilling. ”

The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. ”

We must wake ourselves up! Or somebody else will take our place, and bear our cross, and thereby rob us of our crown. ”