The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out..

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right..

The first book I fell in love with was 'Little Toot,' the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor..

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument..

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effe….

I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writ….

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won….

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn't it?.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at….

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being….

The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I'm not going to win either. It's irrelevant..

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished..

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the tru….

Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write..

You can only give things up once they start to let you down..

It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation..

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control ove….

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself..

People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering..

I'm not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in..