You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

They caught up with each other’s news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome – after two months of having to be witty...

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it...

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social...

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the...

Cos if it’s encyclopedias we’ve got enough, like, information… and if it’s God, you’ve got the wrong house.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie … and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is...

Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other’s rationality; with the knowledge that...

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

It’s like that quote: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ The choice between a duty or a...

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths...

Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose...

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation…

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.