I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

I'm starting to realize that people are beginning to want to know about me. It's a jolly strange idea.

I've got nothing very original to say myself.

I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

Like many people in Britain, I have an affectionate respect for the Queen, and am surprised that I should be having such republican thoughts.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.

The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.

The scribbler's life is never done.

The United States is the ultimate land of optimistic promise, but it also gave birth to quintessentially pessimistic tragedy: 'Moby-Dick.'

Truth comes to us mediated by human love.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.

If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.