Author

Setiap penulis berharap atau dengan berani berasumsi bahwa hidupnya dalam beberapa hal patut dicontoh, bahwa yang khusus akan menjadi universal.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

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.

If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.

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.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

Ketika kesuksesan terjadi pada seorang penulis Inggris, dia memperoleh mesin tik baru. Ketika kesuksesan terjadi pada seorang penulis Amerika, dia memperoleh kehidupan baru.

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.'

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.

You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.

When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.