 I hate to be categorized. |
| The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself. |
| Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right. |
| The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia. |
| There is a huge antipathy in England between the north and the south, the working class and the owning class. |
| But at the same time I went down into the mines with working miners who are still young men, younger than I am, who are aware that their working life is coming to an end and they feel suddenly cut off. |
| I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is. |
| Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class. |
| I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer. |
| I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans. |
| I feel very bad about getting things wrong. |
| I'd always been a great fan of George Orwell. |
| What's wonderful is to read the different translations - some done in 1600 and some in 1900 - of the same passage. It's fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries. |
| The fact is that I loved being in England. |
| Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man. |
| I've always been struck by how unsuspicious people are in general, if you tell them what you're about. |
| If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south. |
| I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books. |
