My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wan….

This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting face….

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot..

I think the Americans are dying to leave Iraq. I was against the war but longed for the fall of Saddam; the decision to go to war clearly was taken l….

My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in….

Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone..

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened..

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat..

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people..

He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futu….

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it ….

I don't really believe in evil at all..

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, ….

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence..

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form..

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair..

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead..

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god..

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad..

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive..