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?

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation,...

It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the’ll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won’t melt the ice...

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.

All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?