Ronald Frame quotes:

At the age of nine, I could cross the length of Glasgow on a succession of buses, wearing regulation garter-topped stockings and compulsory cap and - if I'd done well enough to earn the honour in last week's test - with a First World War medal on a striped ribbon pinned to my brown blazer. I must have looked like a chocolate soldier.

We become attached to certain characters in novels, mostly because they have some mystery attaching to them. We re-read the books, but we're still left wanting to know more. In my own case, it was 'Great Expectations' and Miss Havisham in particular. Luckily, writers have the option of making up the knowledge that reading doesn't supply.

For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.

Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.

As a writer, you need a strong sense of self-belief. And when it comes to writing, I've always had that.

I like French films, Chabrol in particular. With him, you often get a skewed morality in which you sympathise with the person you shouldn't.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

I've actually got quite a good memory. I've good recall. It's often things which other people might not notice.

I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read - from soap operas and movies and so on.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.

I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.

I can remember somebody once saying to me that they thought my life must be less real than these other people that they were writing about, which I found a very peculiar thing 'cos all our lives are equally real, and it's just a matter of depicting them and talking about them.

Let's say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that's simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this - so I don't want fancy descriptions getting in the way.