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.

Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might...

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would...

When its gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. you’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to...

It’s at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is...

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage...

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people...

It’s a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it’s bound to, this will be the one act you’ll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest...

…they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate...

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as...

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an...

Me pregunta usted qué hice cuando vi a aquella chica. Bueno, pues se lo diré. ,Ve usted ese armario de ahí, que llena casi toda la habitación? Vine corriendo hasta aquí, me metí dentro y...

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation–it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might...

There was[is] something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor His absence could be blamed.

Or he was simply pretending—like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.

He’s never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts...

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman’s terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime’s habit...

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though...

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can...

Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he’s good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met,...

Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?