London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist gr...
In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the cert...
When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word — the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different.
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, the...
The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t ex...
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, m...
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll te...
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracl...
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little no...
Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia's thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A life...
In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and qhen she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened...
In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.