Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?

There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.