“’The Crimson Petal and the White’ is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.”
“Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I’m very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I’ve probably already written it.”
“I’m a loner and always have been.”
“For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.”
“When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are ‘procedures in place.’”
“I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.”
“History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That’s very likely to happen to my books, and if I’m extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.”
“I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.”
“I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.”
“I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time.”
“Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.”
“My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I’m in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.”
“Of course it’s fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who’ve never met me, who don’t know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he’s just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.”
“I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, ‘We’ve got this book. I don’t really get it, but we paid for it, so we’ve got to sell it.’ I’m not Tony Parsons; that’s not right for me.”
“I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We’re not going to get rid of that; it’s just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.”
“I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.”
“I’m still tremendously proud of ‘Crimson Petal.’ I’m still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.”
“One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional… Maybe that’s a strong word, but how obsessive I am.”
“I’m constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won’t make sense to anyone other than me, but it is what I’ve spent most of my life doing.”
“I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.”
“In all of my work, I think I’m exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.”
“When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can’t follow them.”
“I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.”
“I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.”
“One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven’t nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman.”
“On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing.”
“Most books are surplus to the world’s requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren’t just using up trees.”
“Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.”
“I don’t remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.”
“When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.”
“If someone’s a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.”
“I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.”
“I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us – we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms – we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we’re gone.”
“The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it’s all right, it cannot be all right.”
“I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.”
“Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.”
“Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.”
“The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after ‘The Crimson Petal’s publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.”
“When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.”
“In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.”
“My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I’m in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.”
“Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.”
“The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors.”
“A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.”
“Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.”
“By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.”
“’A Christmas Carol’ is an extravagantly symbolic thing – as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.”
“I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.”
“All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.”
“At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.”
“I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875’s lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it.”
“So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I’m past all that.”
Leave a Reply