Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only...

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kurią gali įsimylėti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be.

Vieni jausmai laiką pagreitina, kiti sulėtina, o kartais atrodo, kad jis dingsta – kol galop ateina akimirka, kai jis iš tiesų dingsta ir jau niekada nebesugrįžta

Šeimyninės laimės paslaptį sudaro ne jos pilnumas ar bent jau ne gyvenimas kartu su visais jos nariais

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is...

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime’s internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

This […] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to...

If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be...

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way...

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a...

Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let...

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) – how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big...

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten?...

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years,...

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary...

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

Tai, ką galiausiai prisimeni, ne visada yra tas pats, ką patyrei

… forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on.

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women’s eyes: there’s so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes...

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on...

Mariac tells us about the books he’s read, the painters he’s liked, the plays he’s seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger...

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?”History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly.’Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also...

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant...

…I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it...

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease....

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness...

WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and...

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book?

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that...

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make...

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind–or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a...

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs...

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you...

I remember, in no particular order:—a shiny inner wrist;—steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;—gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full...