Quotes

Sometimes I make my characters up, sometimes they appear before me...

Britain looks like a witch riding on a pig.

You've seen the movie of "The Mosquito Coast"? Now you can read the book. "No," he said. "It would ruin the movie for me."

That's how right-winged people talk: me, me, me. Next you'll be ranting about the purity of the race.

It looks overdone because it is overdone, I said. For Christ's suffering to mean something to these tribespeople it has to look worse than what they've been through. Nobody commented further after that.

What, exactly, were the Yorkshire Wolds?

The thing about Buddism, she said, was that it involved your whole life, like, everything that you did that was Buddism, and everything that happened in the World, that was Buddism too. Not politics, I said, that's not Buddism it's just crooked. That's not true, she said, I've been reading Marx, Marx was a kind of Buddist.

I felt like a Ghost, which is the natural condition of the writer.

My only experience in Kabul was failing to have someone released from the Asylum, a Canadian who'd been put there by mistake. He said he didn't mind so long as he had a supply of chocolate bars, it was better than Canada.

Anders, a young Swede with one of those unthawed Scandinavian faces that speaks of sexual smugness and a famished imagination, was in the Bunk opposite.

That's the wonderful thing about Butlins," he said. "You can pay for it out of your Benefits Money.

I didn't think she was crazy in any important way...

[Happy Isles of Oceania] I liked Lataki, the only Loner I had come across.

Once you have a taste of luxury you are changed and there is no cure.