“Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.”
“My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'”
“No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.”
“Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.”
“It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.”
“The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.”
“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”
“If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.”
“It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.”
“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.”