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.

I believe that love between people is the greatest life-giving force in the world. It’s intensely frustrating and inevitably makes a fool of you, but you can’t stop going back to it, and it’s pretty...

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

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...

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

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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