I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven’t got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel...

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. If the only criterion of value is...

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

I’ve found contemporary Britain difficult to write about because it seems to me to have lacked gravity or grandeur. This is some cultural problem which I don’t really understand. It simply isn’t the same in...

Grief is a peculiar emotion.

All my books are about one major idea and two or three subsidiary ones. I have thought a lot about music when constructing books, and I like the way in music that themes come back.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What’s the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

There aren’t many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called ‘Horned Pigeon.’ He had been...

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

It’s only after the change is fully formed that you can see what’s happened.

My ideal relationship with the reader is that at certain points they will have said, ‘I’m finding this quite tough, but I’m going to hang in there,’ then at the end they will say, ‘Oh...

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

Certainly, we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about...

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach – I’m not sure I’d grasped that exactly, but I’d got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

If you have only one life, you can’t altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

There’s no such thing as identity: it’s something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

I don’t do interviews at home any more because my wife doesn’t like having her taste in interiors put through the mill. And I get annoyed when journalists make snide remarks about the annoyingly pretentious...

There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she...

In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don’t really. They choose you

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

Bond doesn’t have an inner life. There would be moments when I’d think, ‘We need to gather our thoughts here and have a breather,’ where in another novel you’d slow the pace, have some description...

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything.

It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur’an is with the Old Testament – against which it holds its own.

I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And...

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

I wonder what it’s like to be dead.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

I don’t know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven’t read a lot of books. I just don’t think you’re equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly...

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your...

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have – and...

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information,...

A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn’t last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn’t endure, or can’t be logically proved and pinned down,...

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.

I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was...

I’d never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I’d grown used to it.

As far as ‘Birdsong’ is concerned, I think the television program made a very honorable attempt at it, but the truth of the matter is that adaptations of long, ambitious books very seldom transfer well...

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every...

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: “Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?””No....

With no blame there’s no shame. A human society can’t exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It’s a central human attribute. In fact, it’s the first human quality ever recorded.”Where?”Genesis, Chapter...

If I hadn’t read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn’t know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be...

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I’ve never minded about it.

My parents’ generation didn’t have any understanding of psychology or emotion or individual temperament. In fact, they were slightly embarrassed by all those words.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.