Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it...

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, ‘Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?’ ‘Send a commission against it, sir,’ the boy says. ‘It must be put down.’ He gives his son...

I believe it’s fine to give up books even after a page; there’s so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain?

You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of...

…this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness,...

Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends. How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even...

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant....

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there’s not much difference between politics and sex; it’s all aboutpower. He...

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than hose of people who’d stayed at home.

Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we...

If Mary’s blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.