britishwatchingadaptationnovelviolentexperienceseeingoldjokessuddenlythrustalarmingstartedenjoymoneyveryquicklyrelaxed
Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy 'Money' very quickly, and then I relaxed.
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.
In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
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.
Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.
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.
If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, then it doesn't matter what creed or colour they are.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual.
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
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.'