How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people’s future.

It’s possible there are no two books in publishing history more dissimilar than ‘Human Traces’ and ‘Devil May Care.’ And that was really the attraction of it.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.

The religion I know most about, which is the Christian one, would simply say that it’s not really for one man or woman to know fully and to understand the nature of our brief human...

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It’s that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana’s don’t do psychological consistency....

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

Why would a novel – which is all about the inward processes of people’s developing feelings and developing relationships – why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as...

I believe your stomach tells you what it wants, and I don’t think mine asks for anything that unhealthy. I’m a trained health machine.

And in that history you’re trying to connect to something that once was yours – to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you...

Depression – that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction – had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte’s life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like...

What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it’s the opposite, obviously. But I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you...

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

The nicest characters in ‘A Week in December’ are, in fact, Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can’t hear it.

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond… flesh, the moment of being alive… then nothing. I had searched in superstition… But there was nothing. Then I heard...

I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people – to take them through the argument by...

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.

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’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...

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

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.

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.

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?

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...

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

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...

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?

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.

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

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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.

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.