"Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face."

"Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness."

"But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting."

"There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine."

"And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."

"You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess."

"For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be."

"Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them."

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."

"The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable."

"Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual."

"Opera cuts to the chase-as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart."

"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves."

"There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd."

"He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense."

"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."

"In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible."

"I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into."

"I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life."

"You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string."

"I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory."

"Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry."

"After a long analysis of Robson's suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet's numbers constant."

"Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?"

"Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more."

"When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself."

"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"

"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

"Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still."

"Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for."

"What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed."

"He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them."

"Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks."

"I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas."

"When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again."

"When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape " into different countries, mores, speech patterns " but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic."

"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."

"Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar."

"Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern."

"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."

"What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?"

"Life always refused simplicity."

"I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history-Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states."

"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."

"If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that."

"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."

"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else."

"You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers."

"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously."