When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life..

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History..

Things are not what they seem..

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling..

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically..

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs..

On buses and trains, I always think about the inexhaustible variety of human genes. We see types, and occasionally twins, but never doubles. All face….

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud….

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free..

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent event….

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers..

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other..

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere..

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed..

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it..

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives c….

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself..

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need w….

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended..

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons….

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're do….