Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

Are you going to give a speech?’ she asked gaily.He gave a choked laugh. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Not for ages.”My cousin Davey gave one on his very first day!’ …’In the Lords, I...

If you look for endings you can always find one, but I truly felt as if I had used up the last of my youth, if youth is that finite stage of life when it...

Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in...

Of course, that’s one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We’re still waiting...

There is nobody as hopelessly vulgar as a British aristocrat…

The two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again

I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a...

If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether...

Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do.

I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. …. The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great...

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it...

There’s nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

the muse.” So I want to lay out one huge, comforting, wonderful fact: the more you write, the better you get at it. Writing is like a forehand or driving a car or playing guitar....

The truth was that I didn’t know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until...

When you’re finally a grown-up, one of the things you find is that there are no grown-ups.