Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction..

Literary critics make natural detectives..

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain..

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape..

Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the b….

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritat….

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood..

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush….

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading.….

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle o….

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell..

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and depe….

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity..

Cyclists. I really hate them. I wish they would not be so self-righteous and realise they are a danger to pedestrians. I wish cyclists would not vind….

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he w….

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the w….

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful..

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surp….

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--….

We two remake our world by naming it / Together, knowing what words mean for us / And for the other for whom current coin / Is cold speech - but we s….

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is..