The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

That was the main thing wrong with Mrs. Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her,...

London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as...

On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger’s considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of...

The only time I’ve ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel,...

He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. Relieving your feelings was fun, but the best course...

He was aware of the irony that he who prized his freedom and willingness to seek the truth had been happiest when he had a defined purpose, a sense of duty and obligation, and a...

The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn’t even bother to respond.

He looked as if he he subsisted exclusively on carbohydrates and ill feeling.

In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong–once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going...

Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.

But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.

It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing...

The idea of luxury, even the word “luxury,” was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact...

It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually...

No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past...

It’s as if people used the invention

Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make...

Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn’t, but if you had...

of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.

The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.

We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives – for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control – and then...

A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not...

In Shahid’s view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn’t be solved by being ignored.

Although he too was heading to work, Shahid was glad he wasn’t dragging himself off to some office job. Shahid’s view: anybody who had to wear a suit to work died a little inside, every...

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.

Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of...

The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn’t that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged,...

But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy...

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just...