What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.