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...