You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.