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.

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

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 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...