“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”

“I sort of play golf because a lot of my friends are into it, but I'm awful - my handicap is about six or seven thousand.”