…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.

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...