We don't read Dickens for Little Nell and Esther Summerson; we read him for Quilp and Carker - all the villains and the wags and the eccentrics. That's where Dickens' energy goes. To channel energy into a good character is very difficult, and not very many writers have made goodness, happiness, the positive, work on the page. Show less «

Weapons are like money: no one knows the meaning of enough.

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. Theodor Adorno's line, 'No poetry after Auschwitz' is in fact contradicted by Paul Celan, who was writing poetry in a Romanian labour camp. Show less «

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

[on fiction set In the Nazi death camps] I respect the view that you shouldn't write about it, but I don't agree with it. Writing is about freedom, and freedom is indivisible. And it makes no philosophical, and certainly no literary sense to say that you stop at the gates of Auschwitz and you can't go in. Show less «

[on the choice of governance] Everywhere else on earth, or certainly in the free world, the argument between bowel and brain was settled centuries ago in favour of brain. 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. I've never had a doubt that you should follow the brain. Of course, there are huge populations that don't feel that way, but in America they don't really impinge on intellectual life except during elections. Show less «

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

Nabokov, who was always a very good guide in these things, was convinced that the way you dealt with extreme villainy in fiction was not to punish it. Your villain is not to be tritely converted, as Dickens tended to do, but the novelist's job is bitter mockery, and that's part of how I'm going at it. Show less «