I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

It's a terrible poison, writing.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.