“People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"

[Interview in, 15 October 2005]”

“And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed. Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.”

“Isn't that why people keep diaries -- to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?”

“When you have mastered the numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading a book. You will be reading meanings.”

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”

“One thing I can say is either to look at films very carefully, watch a lot of films, or don't see any films at all. Just imagine!”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”

“These people where inciting people to violence. That is not allowed in any country, in any democracy. You don't allow that in the United Kingdom, you don't allow that in the United States, or anywhere in the world.”

“Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.”