Author Quotes

A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Travelling expands the mind rarely.

Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with short steps.

My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers.

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Where words fail, music speaks.

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.

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 ar

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.

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

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 th

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

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

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

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

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

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

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.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

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

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.