"The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?"

"It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition."

"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler."

"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."

"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history."

"I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."

"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."

"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."

"What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies."

"In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."

"Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange."

"Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke."

"The land of embarrassment and breakfast."

"Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn t all it s cracked up to be."

"(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."

"Pride makes us long for a solution to things " a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear."

"What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."

"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."

"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."

"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."

"Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty."

"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

"In life, every ending is just the start of another story."

"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art."

"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself."

"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"

"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"

"Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy."

"Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry."

"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."

"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."

"Wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment."

"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."

"May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby."

"But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book."

"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."

"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."