Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
I've always been passionate about England.
'Finnegans Wake,' 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' live on my bedside table back home in London.
How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.
One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.
You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, "Gunga Din" has come back.
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.
I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
I love the U.K. It's so different over there from America, you know, the culture and stuff. It's pretty awesome.
When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.
I've always liked England.
I loved England's gentility and its civility. I'm from the Bronx, with a Bronx accent. I love the beauty of its language, the ways it's spoken. I love the green grass of England and the flowers.
I love London, I love the British people.
Writers in Britain aren't really celebrities. You become kind of a darling of a small set.
British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
I'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.
'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
Then you have people coming up like Malcolm Bradbury, a relatively young writer who deals with the academic scene and deals with it, I think, brilliantly.
