It is remarkable how easily children and grown-ups adapt to living in a dictatorship organised by lunatics.
The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.
I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
I don't write books inadvertently.
When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.
I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.
I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
I wanted passionately to be a priest.
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
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