He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.
At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we’re doing incredibly sweet.
For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense – have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
A man is not much if he can’t depend on himself, and nothing if others can’t depend on him.
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.