Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

Literary critics make natural detectives.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

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.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.