Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy is he who…

Looking around at the faces of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room he felt reassured: not a Lineament of Gratified Desire to be seen.

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still g…

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

My father was a proctologist; my mother was an abstract artist. That's how I view the world.