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.

Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up – at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the...

He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which...

And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver’d of a Child without a Head. So...

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I’m like that old Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’ I want to believe there’s something else going on, but what that something...

Shakespeare: The Biography,

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from...

There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the...

If I did only one thing at a time I’d think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it’s significant, at least to me, that my first work should be...

He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which seemed...

I would have no need for the Memory Of Things past if those which were Present were more agreeable

It’s only recently that we’ve discovered that the artist’s inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I’m happier to create exterior pieces for the world rather than to express something I deeply...

I am the scourge of God

Health, money. That’s what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

And I was a Child again, watching the bright World. But the Spell broke when at this Juncture some Gallants jumped from the Pitt onto the Stage and behaved as so many Merry-Andrews among the...

For when I trace back the years I have liv’d, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer’d Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my...

In ‘The Plato Papers’ I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there’s a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in...

You don’t have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory –...

His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He...

On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to...

‘London’ is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the...

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters,...

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

I don’t in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I’m not.

DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan.VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child...

There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we...

Freud was just a novelist.