“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.

One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.