There was no control except the “mood of his power… and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series...

I’m a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I’m a member of both countries.

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at...

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than...

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient’s mind.

My darling, I’m waiting for you — how long is a day in the dark, or a week? The fire is gone now, and I’m horribly cold. I really ought to drag myself outside but...

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn’t capsized

To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot...

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of...

I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!

Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.

But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character — the way a person...

He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against.

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the...

Nowadays he doesn’t think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the...

It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many...

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.