“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.”

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.

If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.

I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.

There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.

Sensible people take precautions against possible disasters, and of course one man’s idea of precaution is another man’s silly worry.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

You may be a disaster for a day, a month, or a year. Just don’t be a disaster forever.

Sometimes nothing is happening and all that disaster just happens in your mind.

We made a mess of this love, you and I. Forever the most beautiful disaster.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a humanitarian disaster. Please wear a mask.