Andrew O'Hagan

“We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.”

“'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.”

“The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.”

“Like children all over the world, by the age of 10 I'd come to believe that most of the really humane creatures were not really human at all.”

“I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.”

“High culture isn't what it used to be.”

“I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.”

“We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.”

“I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.”

“A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.”

“A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.”

“Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.”

“Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.”

“As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing.”

“When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.”

“I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.”

“Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.”

“When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.”

“I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.”

“There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?”