“I see dull people as projects … to be reformed”

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund

I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.

And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

I’m easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you’ll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.

There are lots of things I could have done for the money, but I’ve made a great living doing the things I want to do.

I loved writing ‘Two Brothers’ more than anything else I have written. It’s the first book I’ve written that I’ve always known I wanted to write. Having said that, it also kept me awake at nights.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators

I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

People who get through life dependent on other people’s possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy – and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God… and where can you go from there?

It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn’t do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes.

There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.