“Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.”

His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

A book, as it were, closes the book.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

“What if I like watching television? What if I don’t want to do much else other than read a book?”.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.