The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster’s cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to...

He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...

Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required...

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

Perhaps I’d been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don’t have to comply with a request just because it’s reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the...

Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.

Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable,...

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!

J’aurais dû traverser l’existence avec ce privilège que donne la beauté, de pouvoir prendre les hommes et les jeter. Au lieu de quoi c’étaient eux qui m’abandonnaient ou mouraient. Ou bien se mariaient.

My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven’t seen described.

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

It’s the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why...

…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

But this inglorious revolution wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a sex shop in every town.

No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and...

Now and then, an inch below the water’s surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple...

…the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be...

It wasn’t torpor that kept her – she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention… Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there’s pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was...

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home–Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that...

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist – he’s dabbled inexpertly – his ten-note span might be of use.

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed...

In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second...

How quickly the dead faded into each other,

There’s a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from...

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a...

Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of...

When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives,...

She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start – she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that...

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them...

They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their...

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the...

While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I...

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles,...

People sometimes forget how to be happy due to a “failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds...

The quiet gravity really wasn’t his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.