Is Dust immortal then, I ask’d him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is...

Thomas More’s birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Historia Regum Britanniae’; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his...

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that...

As soon as he had left the room and walked into the air, he knew that he would never return and for the first time his fears lifted. It was a spring morning, and when...

I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.

It leads to the conclusion that he did not necessarily persevere in his study.

To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone.

When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don’t believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think...

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly...

I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that,...

In London, I’ve always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.

It’s difficult to know where to begin, sir.”Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can’t look that far back.’ He got up from his desk and went...

I have long been of the Opinion, says he, that the Fire was a vast Blessing and the Plague likewise; it gave us Occasion to understand the Secrets of Nature which otherwise might have overwhelm’d...

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and...

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they’re finished, they go. It’s like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it’s there then just release it when it’s...

The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.

I have liv’d long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call’d Time, but I can alter its...

Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I’m writing them. For instance, when I was writing ‘Doctor Dee,’ I believed in magic. And when I wrote ‘Hawksmoor’ I believed in psychic geography. But...

My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It’s a defense....

We went back into the Mens Apartments where there were others raving of Ships that may fly and silvered Creatures upon the Moon: Their Stories seem to have neither Head nor Tayl to them, Sir...

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have...

People are much more interesting than people realise.

This book wrote itself, somehow,

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences – there’s no real pattern.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon

So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of ‘the history play.’ There can be no doubt that Shakespeare’s presentations of ‘Henry V’ and ‘Richard III’ have been incalculably more influential than any more sober...

I don’t find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity....

Then as we passed down this Passage we were knocked against certain Women of the Town, who gave us Eye-language, since there were many Corners and Closets in Bedlam where they would stop and wait...

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in...

There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.

rather like a car coming towards you. I knew I had to do it sometime. And it seemed like a natural progression from the other people I’d done.

I don’t know if I have a voice of my own. I don’t see me being an important person with something to say. I haven’t. I’ve got nothing to say. My opinion is of no...

I don’t believe necessarily the past is in the past. It’s eternal, it’s all around us.

Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls. So that now, if he sat looking down upon Grape Street, the letters and...

His terror became his companion. When it seemed to diminish, or grow easier to bear, he forced himself to remember the details of what he had said and done so that his fears returned, redoubled....

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or...

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most...

She went downstairs slowly and sat in front of the fire, rocking herself to and fro as she imagined all of the harm he might have suffered: she could see him enticed into a car...

DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application....

I love soap operas – the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives – Jessica Fletcher, ‘Columbo,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘L.A. Law.’ Any sense of guilt appeals...

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense ‘English Music’ is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been...

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it’s like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I’ve finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

Insecurity of the spirit demands completeness elsewhere.