When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world.
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.
You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...
There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.
Every love story is a potential grief story.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book – though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?
The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn’t God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God’s magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.
Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
A pier is a disappointed bridge.
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary.
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.