When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.
The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible.
I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips.
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
Didn’t they like you? Didn’t they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves.
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.
I came to this city to escape.
Babies are frightening – raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through.
Ne sachant quoi lire ni dans quel ordre, j’ai suivi l’alphabet. Dieu merci, elle s’appelait Austen...
It seems to me that being the right size for your world – and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions – is a valuable clue to learning how to live.
The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.
We gamble with the thought of winning. But it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.
For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.
I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure.
If the demons lived anywhere it was here.
I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.
Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.