Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.

Failing to see the point is not a virtue.

It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out.

Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love?

Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.

Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing.

When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market.

One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it.

I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing.

The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.

Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making.

There mustn't be a moment when we turn on the TV and think, 'There's Trump in the White House' - that must never feel normal.

I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs.

I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people's opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity.

I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with.

I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.

One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.

As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.

If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.

I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish.

When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject.

When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: 'What's happened to the grand dream of Zionism?' I don't like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What's wrong with Manchester?

My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.

I've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder.

I've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.

You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.

As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them.

Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.

I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.

When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.

You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness.

It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.

Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.

How Donald Trump has come so far with so few words - how he even managed to keep up conversationally with all those beauty queens - is a question I don't expect ever to be solved.

Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary.

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.

Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind.

I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that.

A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.

You don't divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator.

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.

Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.

Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality... Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don't determine in advance the worth of what we make.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular.

Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on.