The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.

You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.

The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.

The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of.

Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.

I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly 'saved' by reading, at least partially 'repaired' by it: made the better morally and existentially.

As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.

'Great Expectations', in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be.

Literature is a house with many mansions.

The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism.

If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.

To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.

To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else.

Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.

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.