A biographer has to get as emotionally close to his/her subject as possible: otherwise the writing won't come to life at all. |
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem. |
Also I had financial worries because it took four years to write and we were living off my wife's income all that time, which wasn't very great. |
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism. |
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you? |
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic. |
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels. |
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control. |
But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics. |
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons. |
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't. |
Dickens, obviously, is a great hero. |
Everybody is excited by his experience and enthusiasm. Everybody is impressed. |
From our perspective, the session was a success. |
I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it. |