Lists are a form of power.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.