top of page
.png){kind=small}
"A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing."
Standard
Customized
More
"A bad book with a good cover is nothing but a wooden house with a golden door."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
Author Name
Personal Development
"They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can."
Books
"When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises."
Will
"Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions."
Science
"By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets."
People
"Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes."
Time
"When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while."
Preparation
"A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing."
Books
"I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me."
Comedy
"I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges."
Work
"I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid."
Nature
bottom of page