I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became cle...
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
Do it from the heart or not at all.
Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.
When I was born, my mother dressed me as a boy because she could not afford to feed any more daughters. By the mystic laws of gender and economics, it ruins a peasant to place half a bowl of figs in f...
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, d...
We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment...
Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the w...
The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.
The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.
The only selfish life is a timid one.
The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There...
Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same thing as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine...The pursuit of happiness is more el...
My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.
Love is as strong as death.
Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us...
It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.